Free Republic

The notion of burning books is, or should be, quite repugnant to those with an interest in maintaining a free society. Whether it’s environmentalists setting ablaze a book which challenges man-made global warming theory, or conservatives putting flames to a progressive’s anti-white-themed offering, never should Ray Bradbury’s warning of Fahrenheit 451 be forgotten. But in “equity” consultant Kimya Dennis’s case, she’d likely shrug off that notion — because Bradbury was a white man.

Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, from which perch they require students to take social-justice courses, such as “Native Sexualities and Queer Discourse” or “Hip-hop Workshop,” and attend social-justice events—such as a Reparations, Repatriation, and Redress Symposium or a Power and Privilege Symposium—in order to graduate. But social-justice education is...

SAN FRANCISCO — Since the 2016 election, when Russian trolls and a tsunami of misinformation turned social media into a partisan battlefield, Facebook has wrestled with the role it played in President Donald Trump’s victory. Now, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, a longtime Facebook executive told employees that the company had a moral duty not to tilt the scales against Trump as he seeks reelection. On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the...

1. A college diversity-training course taught that it was culturally insensitive to expect people to be on time. 2. The phrase “trigger warning” was deemed a trigger. 3. A professor was accused of sexual harassment for saying that effort is 10 percent of the grade. 4. A campus survey included a trigger warning to caution college students that it may contain “anatomical names of body parts.” 5. University researchers demanded that we accept people who “identify as real vampires.” 6. A Seattle-area councilman was concerned about the city hosing poop off of its sidewalks because he thought that it might...

American journalist H.L. Mencken once observed, “Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.” Despite an unending respect for Mencken, this is an occasion in which I found him mistaken, after I violated the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not testify for Republicans.” Worse yet, I am a recidivist sinner, after testifying as a constitutional expert in both the Clinton and Trump impeachment hearings. Like all mortal sins, the violation of the Eleventh Commandment comes with not just eternal but immediate damnation. What is most...

One of the largest glaring issues with how Silicon Valley is approaching censorship is the fact that the goalposts being set by firms are all over the board, with little industry-wide discussion on approach and limits, and other sensitivities for how such an important task is to be accomplished with transparency and due process. So what has censorship in the modern age for the Facebooks and Twitters of the world devolved into? Siloed decision making by secretive "boards" that have limited diversification of background and worldview, all pushing ever-changing directives out to technical teams which must implement these wishes into...

President Trump on Thursday tweeted out an article that names the alleged anti-Trump CIA whistleblower — Eric Ciaramella. In fact, on Friday night several of President Trump’s tweets went missing — and several of the accounts he tweeted were deleted by Twitter. And Twitter was also caught shaving THOUSANDS of likes off of President Trump’s tweets. Twitter later responded to CNN and admitted to deleting several pro-Trump accounts after President Trump retweeted them. But after Twitter got caught they finally released a statement on Saturday night saying these anti-Trump maneuvers were just a glitch.

Epoch Times and conservative outlet the Gateway Pundit have been banned from use as reliable sources on Wikipedia in the latest cases of news outlets that support President Trump being banned from the online encyclopedia. The Epoch Times ban proposal cited NBC’s hit piece on the site over its coverage of improprieties in the Russia investigation, commonly called Spygate, which prompted smear efforts against the outlet on Wikipedia. Gateway Pundit was proposed for a ban shortly after Epoch Times.

Google-owned YouTube has deleted Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov's viral lecture on the process of subversion for "hate speech." The move came just days after YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki unveiled a new subversive "harassment policy" which bans "malicious insults" against "public officials" who are members of a "protected" class. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's new "harassment policy" bans "malicious insults" against "public officials" who are members of a "protected" class. #YouTubeIsOverParty https://t.co/FeoccP6ftU — Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) December 11, 2019 Last I saw it, Bezmenov's lecture had well over a million views. It went viral on Reddit just around two weeks ago...

December 9, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – LifeSite has been locked out of Twitter for “violating” its “rules” after tweeting an article about Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv, a transgender activist who recently complained that gynecologists wouldn’t see him as a patient. Yaniv is famous for taking 15 beauticians to the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal over their refusal to wax his genitals, a battle he ultimately lost. Twitter gave LifeSiteNews the option to delete the tweet and reactivate our account immediately. But instead we have launched an appeal of the decision. Twitter claimed that the tweet violated its rules, but didn’t specify which...

Forget the $120,000 banana, this new piece of art is priceless… The duct-taped banana at Art Basel is gone and has been replaced with “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself,” which security quickly covered up. And the fact that they felt the need to hide it makes this modern art by definition. The duct-taped banana at Art Basel is gone and has been replaced with “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself,” which security quickly covered up. 😂 pic.twitter.com/nPtnuCm6sc — Giancarlo Sopo (@GiancarloSopo) December 9, 2019

Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, one of the anti-Trump witnesses at yesterday’s impeachment inquiry, is reportedly playing a critical role in Facebook’s establishment of its content oversight board, colloquially dubbed the “Facebook Supreme Court.” The oversight board will, among other things, review cases from banned Facebook users who argue that the termination of their accounts was unwarranted. It is meant to give banned users the right to appeal — but this is corporate due process, not state due process. The “Facebook Supreme Court” will be set up by Facebook and could be shut down at any time by Facebook.

More than 300 ads from President Trump’s re-election campaign were removed by YouTube and Google over the summer for “violating company policy,” according to a new report. The video ads paid for by Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., ran for several days on YouTube before being taken down, an investigation by “60 Minutes” found Sunday. When quizzed on why the ads were pulled, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said some of videos were “not approved to run,” before deferring any further questions to Google’s online transparency report, which keeps an archive of political ads. But the...

FULL TITLE: This Explains Their Censorship: Twitter’s “Director of Trust and Safety Council” -Jen Clarke – Is a Trump-Hating, Pussy-Marching Far Left Lunatic We reported in July 2018 that Twitter has long been accused of censoring conservatives. Twitter was indeed censoring and shadowbanning the President of the United States, Donald Trump’s twitter account, @realDonaldTrump. Twitter is still at it! In July 2018 we reported that a study by the leftist website VICE News found that Twitter is censoring top pro-Trump lawmakers. Twitter is targeting pro-Trump Republican lawmakers Matt Gaetz, Devin Nunes, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and John Ratcliffe with the...

...Because adults at places like Bucknell and Holy Cross have convinced them they are oppressed.... Few things upset American college students more than being told they aren’t oppressed. I recently spoke at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. I argued that American undergraduates are among the most privileged individuals in history by virtue of their unfettered access to knowledge. Far from being discriminated against, students are surrounded by well-meaning faculty who want all of them to succeed. About 15 minutes into my talk, as I was discussing Renaissance humanism, a majority of the audience in the packed...

DC Comics deleted a poster for its new ‘Batman’ comic after Chinese internet users piled on the company, accusing it of hiding a pro-democracy message in the image to support protesters in Hong Kong. The poster—which showed Batman lobbing a flaming Molotov cocktail in the foreground, with the phrase, "the future is young" behind him—was to promote DC's new comic, "Dark Knight Returns: The Golden Child." However, some commentators in mainland China claimed the poster had a secret agenda, and likened the superhero’s black mask and improvised grenade to the tools of the youthful activists who have taken over Hong...

SHANGHAI — The video app TikTok on Wednesday reversed its decision to block an American teenager who posted a clip in which she discussed the mass internment of minority Muslims in China, and acknowledged that its moderation system had overreached in shutting her out of her account. The incident raised fresh concerns about whether TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese tech giant ByteDance, muzzles its users in line with censorship directives from Beijing — an accusation the company has denied. TikTok said the teenager, Feroza Aziz, 17, had been barred from using her personal device to access the app,...

These social media companies are Satanic. Social media giant Twitter has quietly amended their terms of service to allow for “discussions related to… attraction towards minors” to be allowed on their platform. “Discussions related to child sexual exploitation as a phenomenon or attraction towards minors are permitted, provided they don’t promote or glorify child sexual exploitation in any way,” reads Twitter’s terms of service. Twitter allow noted that they would allow for nude depictions of children on their platform in certain instances. “Artistic depictions of nude minors in a non-sexualized context or setting may be permitted in a limited number...

The Serious Threat of Politicians Freely Communicating With the Public Won’t someone protect the people from themselves? Wed Nov 6, 2019 Daniel Greenfield 26 Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism. Robert Reich dated Hillary Clinton. Eventually the diminutive leftist became Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and parlayed that into teaching a class at UC Berkeley on Wealth and Poverty for six figures. Reich, who claims to be an expert on “inequality”, pulled down $304,802 in gross pay in 2018. The University of...

Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer credited with having invented the World Wide Web in 1989, has released an ambitious plan detailing steps for better online governance, addressing problems like misinformation, data surveillance and censorship. The Contract for the Web was created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation in cooperation with representatives from governments, companies and civil society to “keep knowledge freely available,” while strengthening laws, regulations and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy.” The plan is backed by more than 150 organizations, including internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook,...